Author: Natalie Dillon

On mornings like this one, a certain stillness descends upon the Big Sioux River corridor; the air is cloudy, dense with humidity approaching 93%, and seems to have been taken from somewhere much wetter. Right now, if you were standing anywhere close to downtown Sioux Falls, you would notice that the sky is low and gray, that the wind is coming from the southeast, and that the day seems to be building toward something. Yes, it is. By noon, thunderstorms and showers are predicted, and they won’t be mild. Before tonight ends, AccuWeather is warning that hail and damaging winds…

In Corpus Christi, there is a specific type of morning when the sky appears serene enough to deceive you. Yes, it’s cloudy, but the gentle gray light that hangs over Corpus Christi Bay gives you the impression that the day might be easy. It won’t. The Gulf of Mexico effectively transforms the entire city into a pressure cooker with a view by early afternoon, when the temperature rises above 31°C and the humidity approaches 87%. That isn’t precisely a complaint. It’s simply what it means to live here. If you haven’t lived along the Texas Gulf Coast, you may not…

Sam goes to parkrun in Hampshire’s Alice Holt Forest every Saturday morning. He characterizes his weeks as “hectic”—full of cacophony, sensory overload, and the unique weariness that comes with being neurodivergent in a world that hardly ever slows down. However, something changes beneath the trees. The sound of leaves, the cool air, and the physical rhythm of walking through a living environment. “Even ten minutes in this forest makes the week better,” he said. It may seem insignificant, but it is central to the message that WWF’s Prescription for Nature campaign seeks to convey to the rest of the nation.…

A local villager in Chaiyaphum Province, northeastern Thailand, noticed something strange near the edge of a shared pond sometime in 2016 during the dry season. Every dry season in that region of the country causes the water level to drop, and what appeared to be unusually large, oddly shaped rocks protruded from the exposed earth. They weren’t rocks. They were the remains of the biggest dinosaur ever discovered in Southeast Asia. The animal had been peacefully resting there for between 100 and 120 million years. The animal is now known as Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis. Although it’s a mouthful, the reasoning behind…

The moment Boris Pistorius stood at the Berlin Space Congress in September 2025 and informed the audience that space, not Germany’s aging navy or its eastern border, was the country’s greatest weakness has an almost subdued dramatic quality. Not the kind that is poetic. The practical, icy kind. the unseen satellite network that powers military communications, ATMs, and wind farms. More than any budget announcement, that moment marked a real shift in Germany’s perspective on its own vulnerability. The €35 billion set aside for military space capabilities by 2030 is a figure that is difficult to ignore. To put it…

On a hot day, the light in Kew Gardens has a certain quality; it is heavy and golden, falling over the flower beds like something taken from the Mediterranean. This week’s Monday saw a temperature of 35.1 degrees Celsius. When you take into account what it replaced—the previous May record for the entire United Kingdom was 32.8 degrees—that figure seems abstract. This was not a slight improvement over an outdated standard. It was completely rewritten. In stuffy bedrooms, on hot commutes, and in parks where the grass had already turned yellow at the edges, the Met Office confirmed what many…

Observing snow accumulate on a flowering tree causes a certain kind of dissonance. Wet snow bent the branches of trees that had just begun to bloom in Fort Collins, Colorado, during the first week of May. The scene felt more like nature forgetting the month than late winter. Not in January, but in the spring, when most people had already switched their scraper for sunscreen, that storm dropped 5.8 inches of snow on Denver, the city’s second-largest snowfall of the entire winter. It wasn’t an anomaly. Strangely, it was the second act of a season that managed to save itself.…

Watching a global weather forecast is almost unsettling. A region of the ocean that roughly corresponds to the eastern and central tropical Pacific is warming at a rate that NOAA forecasters are referring to as a “rare occurrence.” And yet here we are, with scientists subtly shifting their language from cautious to alarmed as we approach what might be one of the strongest El Niño events in recorded history. El Niño starts off fairly modestly. The force of trade winds, which typically drive warm surface water westward toward Southeast Asia, diminishes. Back east, the warm water sloshes. The deep, cold…

The image of a research vessel somewhere in the Pacific lowering a sealed sample tube into water that hasn’t seen sunlight in millennia and retrieving sediment that has lain undisturbed at the ocean’s bottom for thousands of years is subtly unsettling. It wasn’t just mud that emerged. A study that was published in the journal mBio claimed that it was something living. or something that, given the correct host, came to life. 106 deep-sea sediment samples from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans were gathered by researchers at the College of Life Sciences in Qingdao, China. The sediment came from…

In ocean research, there is a moment that keeps happening in different labs on different continents by scientists who all expected the same thing and received the same surprise. They wait for silence while lowering a microphone thousands of feet or almost seven miles into the depths. They never understand. When researchers from NOAA and Oregon State University lowered a titanium-encased hydrophone into the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, past 36,000 feet of crushing pressure and complete darkness, what emerged was more akin to a traffic intersection than a void. There is an earthquake. Baleen whales’ low moan. The…